POTTERY INFLUENCED BY LOCAL MINERALS.
Before discussing the origin of other forms, it may be well to consider briefly some influences, more or less local, which, in addition to the general effect of gourd-forms in suggesting basket-types and of the latter in shaping earthenware, had considerable bearing on the development of ceramic art in the Southwest, pushing it to higher degrees of perfection and diversity in some parts than in others.
Perhaps first in importance among these influences was the mineral character of a locality. Where clay occurred of a fine tough texture, easily mined and manipulated, the work in terra cotta became proportionately more elaborate in variety and finer in quality. There are to be found about the sites of some ancient pueblos, potsherds incredibly abundant and indicating great advancement in decorative art, while near others, architecturally similar, even where evidence of ethnic connection is not wanting, only coarse, crudely-molded, and painted fragments are discoverable, and these in limited quantity.
An example in point is the ruined pueblo of A' wat u i or Aguatóbi, as it was known to the Spaniards at the time of the conquest, when it was the leading "city of the Province of Tusayan," now Moki. Over the entire extent of this ruin, and to a considerable distance around it, fragments of the greatest variety in color, shape, size, and finish of ware occur in abundance. In the immediate neighborhood, however, are extensive, readily accessible formations producing several kinds of clay and nearly all the color minerals used in the Pueblo potter's art. Yet at the greatest ruin on the upper Colorado Chiquito (in an arm of the valley of which river A' wat ú i itself occurs), where the fallen walls betoken equal advancement in the status of the ancient builders and indicate by their vast extent many times the population of A' wat u i, the potsherds are coarse, irregular in curvature, badly decayed, and exceptionally scarce. In the immediate neighborhood of this ruin, I need not add, clay is of rare occurrence and poor in quality.
A more reliable example is furnished by the farming pueblos of Zuñi. At Hé sho ta tsí nan or Ojo del Pescado, fifteen miles east of Zuñi, clays of several varieties and color minerals are abundant. The finest pottery of the tribe is made there in great quantity, while, notwithstanding the facilities for transportation which the Zuñis now possess, at the opposite farming town of K`iáp kwai na kwin, or Los Ojos Calientes, where clay is scarce and of poor texture, the pottery, although somewhat abundant, is of miserable quality and of bad shape.
In quality of art quite as much as in that of material this local influence was great. In the neighborhood of ruined pueblos which occur near mineral deposits furnishing a great variety of pigment-material, the decoration of the ceramic remains is so surprisingly and universally elaborate, beautiful, and varied as to lead the observer to regard the people who dwelt there as different from the people who had inhabited towns about the sites of which the sherds show not only meager skill and less profuse decorative variety, but almost typical dissimilarity. Yet tradition and analogy, even history in rare instances, may declare that the inhabitants of both sections were of common derivation, if not closely related and contemporaneous. Probably, at no one point in the Southwest was ceramic decoration carried to a higher degree of development than at A' wat u i, yet the Oraibes, by descent the modern representatives of the A' wat u i ans are the poorest potters and painters among the Mokis. Near their pueblo the clay and other mineral deposits mentioned as abundant at A' wat u i are meager and inaccessible. Still, it may be urged that time may have introduced other than natural causes for change; this could not be said of another example pertaining to one period and a single tribe. I refer again to the Zuñis. The manufactures of Pescado probably surpass in decorative excellence all other modern Pueblo pottery, while both in their lack of variety and in delicacy of execution of their painted patterns the fictiles of Ojo Caliente are so inferior and diverse from the other Zuñi work that the future archæologist will have need to beware, or (judging alone from the ceramic remains which he finds at the two pueblos) he will attribute them at least to distinct periods, perhaps to diverse peoples.
POTTERY INFLUENCED BY MATERIALS AND METHODS USED IN BURNING.
Other influences, to a less extent local, had no inconsiderable effect on primitive Pueblo pottery: materials employed and methods resorted to in burning.
Only one kind of fuel, except for a single class of vessels, is now used in pottery-firing; namely, dried cakes or slabs of sheep-dung. Anciently, several varieties, such as extremely dry sage-brush or grease-wood, piñon and other resinous woods, dung of herbivora when obtainable, charcoal, and also bituminous or cannel-coal were employed. The principal agent seems, however, to have been dead-wood or spunk, pulverized and moistened with some adhesive mixture so that flat cakes could be formed of it. I infer this not alone from Zuñi tradition, which is not ample, but from the fact that the sheep-dung now used is called, in the condition of fuel, kú ne a, while its name in the abstract or as sheep-dung simply is má he. Dry-rot wood or spunk is known as kú me. In the shape of flat cakes it would be termed kú mo we or kú me a, whence I doubt not the modern word kú ne a is derived.